You can thank Italy for this classic moment

The modern zombie movie is a thoroughly American invention, forged in Pittsburgh by George A. Romero. But like rock and roll and nuclear weapons, it wasn’t long before foreigners had a look and decided they just had to make their own homegrown versions. Before the blood was even dry on his incredible undead innovation, zombie began popping up all over the world, a trend that continues to this day. Once you’ve finished picking the corpse of Romero’s canon clean, had your brains eaten by Return of the Living Dead and devoured Zombieland  and are ready to travel the world in search of new zombie thrills, this handy guide should get you started. It’s by no means comprehensive—that’s a book, not a blog post—but it should serve as an intro to what the world outside of the good old USA offers the zombie aficionado.

Italy
Apart from the United States, arguably no country has made as great a contribution to the zombie genre as Italy. That said, a huge percentage of the Italian zombie movies are terrible. There are some stone-cold classics, however. Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (a.k.a. Zombi 2, Zombie Flesh Eaters, and other titles) is the best place to start, and absolutely indispensable. It has its issues, but it features a zombie fighting a shark, and where else are you going to find that? His Gates Of Hell trilogy—The City Of The Living Dead, The Beyond, and The House By The Cemetery—also has its moments, especially The Beyond. The Italian-Spanish co-production Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is excellent and underrated, and Dellamorte Dellamore (a.k.a. Cemetery Man, another cooperative international venture that brings France and Germany into the fold) is an obscure gem that’s not quite like any other zombie movie you’ll find.

Spain
Spain’s undead MVP is the recent series [REC] (remade as Quarantine in the U.S.). The first movie inverted the classic Night Of The Living Dead paradigm, trapping a small group of people inside an apartment building with a small, but ever-growing, number of zombies. The result is a claustrophobic nightmare full of well-earned tension, terror-inducing moments, and ramping paranoia. The second film, [REC] 2, bears the same relation to the first as Aliens did to Alien, bringing in more firepower and more zombies with equally horrific results for all involved. The third, [REC] 3: Genesis, marks a tonal shift to horror comedy, but is no less enjoyable than its predecessors.

Norway
The good people of Norway managed what no other country ever has, despite repeated attempts: They made an entertaining movie about Nazi zombies in Dead Snow. These particular Nazi zombies are after revenge and a bunch of stolen gold, in that order (really, the gold is just an excuse for the revenge, obviously). The film suffers a bit in its over-earnest and over-done homage to The Evil Dead and Dead-Alive, but as long as you can forgive it those transgressions, it’s a fun, pleasantly gory, and engaging film.

England
Merry old England has the distinction of creating two of the best, and most influential, zombie movies of all time. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later  revived the dying genre in the early ’00s, bringing a new, faster, less-dead version of zombies to the screen and changing the genre forever. No less important is Shaun Of The Dead, a movie that managed to shoehorn a romantic comedy into a straight-up zombie apocalypse story and make both parts work equally well. No wonder it quickly became an all-time classic of the genre, then.

New Zealand
Before Peter Jackson brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life, he created the ludicrous gorefest that is Dead-Alive (Braindead in its native New Zealand). A bizarre, blood-drenched tale of young love, mother issues, and the perils of trying to handle a zombie outbreak on your own, Dead-Alive put New Zealand on the undead map in a major way, earning a reputation as possibly the bloodiest movie of all time. Sure, the country has yet to produce anything else anywhere near its caliber, but there’s still time. And somewhere, there’s got to be another Sumatran rat monkey waiting to cause trouble…

Japan
In recent years, Japan has made a strong bid to replace Italy as the international king of the zombie movie. Also like Italy, a lot of its zombie movies are atrocious. The exceptions are quite good, however. Start with JUNK, a Tarantino-esque tale of a group of amateur jewel thieves who run afoul of both the Yakuza and a group of zombies created as part of a military experiment gone awry. Also good is Versus, arguably the best martial-arts-and-magic meets zombie epic ever made. For sheer lunacy, Stacy—about a disease that turns adolescent girls into zombies called “Stacies”—is hard to top, although the more recent Tokyo Zombie—about a pair of jujitsu-obsessed idiots stumbling their way through a zombie apocalypse—gives it a run for its money.

China
China—Hong Kong, really—has made a few forays into the undead, with at least one solid film to show for it in BioZombie. Set in a mall—no doubt intentional shades of Dawn Of The Dead—BioZombie follows a pair of hapless, low-level criminals that accidentally come into possession of, and subsequently unleash, an Iraqi bioweapon that returns the dead to a shambling, flesh-hungry mockery of life. A relatively light-hearted comedy with a surprisingly dark ending, the film manages to shoehorn in one of the few zombie-human love stories in cinematic history alongside the usual gory set pieces and comic antics.

This piece originally appeared, in a slightly different version, at the Denver/Boulder A.V. Club, when it still existed (RIP).

In Monster Nation, the second book in David Wellington’s “Monster” trilogy, we go back, to the beginning of the zombie apocalypse that’s a foregone conclusion in Monster Island. The book opens with an attack in California, then switches to strange happenings high in the mountains of Colorado, both events that any undead aficionado will quickly realize are the first pieces of a zombie puzzle. Before long we’re witnessing the slow fall of the Florence ADX (aka Supermax) prison to the newly vigorous dead and things really get rolling.

Like its predecessor, Monster Nation focuses primarily on two protagonists, one living and one undead. The living is a man named Bannerman Clark, an uptight, career National Guardsman who’s lucky (or unlucky) enough to be in the right place at the right time to be on the front lines of the dead rising. The undead is a woman called Nilla who maintains most of her intelligence as she dies, making her the rare smart zombie. As the story unfolds, Clark’s motivation is clear and his goals simple: he just wants to stop the world from ending, once he realizes that’s what happening. Nilla makes for a more complicated and, to some degree, conflicted character. She retains some degree of her humanity, as a consequence of her intelligence. Despite that, she is still a zombie, and thus likes to do zombie things, like eat the living, no matter how bad she feels about it. This structure, and that conflicted-zombie setup, should be familiar to readers of Monster Island.

Nilla is the target of the intense interest of a few different parties, including Clark and others that can’t be revealed with spoiling plot points, because of her “specialness.” Much of the story, perhaps a third to half, centers around this pursuit of her by Clark and others, with the rest of it focusing on Clark learning what’s happening and fighting zombies, and Nilla slowly learning what she is. Naturally, the climax of the book comes after she and Clark cross paths and begin to work out what’s going on to cause the dead to rise. As to what that climax is… well, this is a prequel to a book where the zombie apocalypse is well into the apocalypse stage, so it’s not too much of a spoiler to suggest things don’t work out so well for the human side, is it?

The book offers plenty of the solid, fall-of-humanity action that forms the backbone of zombie apocalypse lit. Most of it is shown directly via the characters’ experience, but bits and pieces are delivered with excerpts from news reports, blog posts and diary entries interspersed throughout. It’s a nice way to add a bit of offscreen color and an epic sweep to the relatively focused main storylines.

Overall, Monster Nation is a solid book that still feels like a bit of a disappointment. That’s because, as good as it is, it falls well short of Monster Island. Compared to the tight plotting and gripping story of Island, Nation meanders a bit, lacking focus and impact. It’s stuffed with secondary and tertiary characters that seem jammed in without much effect, and it doesn’t help that the main story arc can only end one way (seriously, if you know the zombie apocalypse is still happening in Island, it’s obvious that Clark is going to fail, whatever happens with Nilla). Again, these aren’t fatal errors—this is by no means a bad book. It’s just not nearly as good as its predecessor.

Call it a sophomore slump, point to the inherent unwieldiness of origin stories, or just accept that Monster Island was something special and it’s hard to catch the same lighting in a bottle twice, but no matter how you spin it, Nation is a letdown. An entertaining letdown worthy of a read, sure, but still a letdown. Now, let’s hope that Monster Planet ends the series on a high note…

See also: 

- Monster Island review

Photo by nicolas genin

George A. Romero. The father of the modern zombie. Arguably the most influential filmmaker in the horror genre. Legend. Icon.

And, as it turns out, a pretty nice guy.

When I first launched this site, one of the biggest things I hoped it would eventually lead to was a chance to talk to George A. Romero (my very first post was a happy birthday message to him!). This past weekend, it did and I got 20 minutes with the man himself. It wasn’t long, certainly, but it was still pretty fucking great. We talked about The Walking Dead, video games, what he’s working on and lots more. I’m sure I don’t have to sell you on reading this — if you’re reading this site, you love zombies. If you love zombies, you’re going to want to read this. So onward…

IZA: I’ll be moderating a panel with you,  Max Brooks and Steven Schlozman soon. How did you meet them and how well do you know them?

George A. Romero: From conventions and things, I’ve run into Max at a lot of these horror conventions I do occasionally. I don’t do them that often, but Max, I think, does more than I do and he’s been there several times. He actually hosted an awards thing I was given, and I’ve just known him over the years, and of course because of his work. I’m interested in anybody that’s crazy enough to go out with zombies. That’s really how I know him.

Steve called me up one day. He was writing this novel called The Zombie Autopsies and he called up to just pick my brain, just to chat basically. My partner and I wound up buying the rights to the book, so I’m adapting it right now into a screenplay. Steve and I, over the least three years or whatever it’s been, two and a half, have become pretty good friends.

And I understand that this is the first panel you and Max have done together?

Yes, it is.

And you mentioned you’re currently adapting Zombie Autopsies into a screenplay. Is that something you also hope to direct?

I hope so. But hey, if Brad Pitt wants to buy it … [laughs]

You’d be willing to let it go if the check was big enough?

I think so. I think both Steve and I would. We’d love to just stay in control of it, but I think, I have a suspicion by the time I am finished with it, it’s not going to be inexpensive. It’s not going to be three million, it’s going to be more like ten or fifteen. And that might make it something that I don’t even necessarily want to do. I’ve sort of gone back with my last several films — after Land of the Dead, man, I just dropped back into the backfield and I just so much enjoyed working with small budgets and with crews that I know and love. That’s been my thing for the last couple projects that I’ve done. I just don’t want that rat race any more. Land of the Dead was no fun.

I read a bunch of interviews with you from around that time and it seemed like that movie almost ruined zombies for you, at least for a short while.

It didn’t. Even while I was working on it, I had already had the idea. You know, what happens is it takes so long for one of those deals to develop. So we were working on that thing for, it seems like forever. And I already had the next idea, the idea for Diary of the Dead and I was ready to roll with it. It actually came pretty quickly after Land. It was the shortest period between my zombie films, and so was the next one [Survival of the Dead]. The same people financed it and they were standing by, ready with a check. So I was able to sort of knock those out pretty quickly, a year and a half apart. But that’s it, I think, for a while.

I had the idea for Diary, which was I wanted to do something about citizen journalism. That’s where that idea came from. And unfortunately, I wasn’t really ready for the next one [Survival], but I just made it a more general statement about tribalism and party lines. As it turns out, it was maybe a bit prophetic. Look what’s happening in the states now, with the left and the right.

Around the time Survival came out, there was some discussion of several more sequels. Whatever became of that?

Yeah, I was ready with it. I had started a script, and I was ready to roll and the same people were ready to finance it. But then, Survival just went out and Magnolia just trashed it. They just didn’t do anything with it. That’s the way it goes. So then nobody wanted gamble on another one quickly. But anyway, I’m standing by, waiting for something to happen.

Seems likely you’ll get another shot, as popular as zombies continue to be.

I know. I keep waiting for them to die. I somehow feel that, you know, I used to be the only guy doing this stuff. Now, everybody’s in my playground.

It’s true. I’ve been following zombie culture intently for five or six years, watching it grow and and grow, and I keep waiting for a backlash, for people to get sick of it and move on to the next thing. but it keeps not happening. Now, I don’t know.

I don’t know, The Walking Dead did the best opening numbers for a cable series, ever, for this opening episode. So it keeps going. And I don’t think it’s movies that keep it going, although The Walking Dead is really important. But I really think it has been video games that have kept zombies on the front burner, rather than films. None of the films has made that much money that it would cause Hollywood to react in a big way. World War Z is probably going to be — it is already — the biggest budgeted zombie film. I don’t know. You hear all kinds of stuff, you know, “Oh, it’s a troubled production” but that’s what they said about Titanic.

Do you follow The Walking Dead? Is that something you’re watching?

No, I don’t. Frankly, it pisses me off. It’s just not… I hosted, and I think they wrangled me into this, I did their Halloween thing last year and I hosted all their programs for the month, AMC. So I had to watch a couple, I watched the first two episodes. I thought it was pretty good, the first couple episodes when Frank [Darabont] was doing it. And I don’t know why they got rid of Frank, I don’t know any of the inside dope, but anyway, I find it … I think you could almost satirize it. You could almost make it a complete soap opera, with an occasional zombie attack. It’s just a soap! Anyway, it’s cool.

You got your start in television, right? Way back in the day you worked on the Mr. Rogers show, right?

Yeah, I did. I used to shoot, he had this thing called “Picture Picture” and I shot all the remotes. i was the guy that went out with film cameras and shot the remote things. “How do you make a lightbulb,” and “Fred gets a tonsillectomy,” things like that.

That’s quite a career arc, from Mr. Rogers to …

I don’t know why they called me. I guess they thought the tonsillectomy should be appropriately scary.

Given that start in TV, and The Walking Dead being such a huge thing now, if some bright producer came up with the idea of “Hey, why don’t we get George Romero to do a TV show for us,” is that something you’d be interested in?

Yes, we would be. And my partner is actually pitching an idea right now, I don’t know if it’s going to happen. But I wouldn’t resist it at all. In fact, we tried. We tried for years to pitch Night of the Living Dead as a TV series, which basically would have been very much like The Walking Dead. We wanted to do the same thing with it, have people roaming around — basically the concept of the graphic novels — living in trailer camps and whatever. We did try to pitch it for years, and we just missed the boat. I think it was the graphic novel that caused, I don’t know, somebody was able to go in and pitch it, maybe because they got Frank involved and Nicotero on the effects side, and now he’s one of the producers. It just went through the roof.

We’re trying to do something that’s the same but not the same. In the same ballpark, but not similar story wise. We have a pitch out there, but you never know if anyone’s going to [buy]. They may just say, “It’s too much like The Walking Dead” or they might say, “Hmm, maybe there’s room for one more.” You just never know until you’re at the meet.

You mentioned video games earlier, and it certainly seems like they’ve played a huge role in the popularity of the zombie. In the ‘90s in particular, there weren’t a lot of great zombie films being made, but the Resident Evil games kept zombies alive.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I was involved [with those], I wrote a screenplay for the first Resident Evil film. We thought it was a shoo-in. I though Capcom loved it, everybody loved the script. But the guy that runs Constantin, it just wasn’t the way he wanted to go. I don’t think he knew anything about video games, or anything else. This is the guy that made House of the Spirits and Das Boot and I don’t think he knew the spirit of the video game was meant to be. Frankly, and of course I have an axe to grind there, but I really didn’t like the movies.

I’d heard that before, and I have to say it is one of my eternal disappointments that George Romero’s Resident Evil did not get made. If I had to make a top ten list of movies I’d want to see that never got made, that would be right at the top. I’d have loved to have seen that.

[Laughs] Well, okay. Thank you. [Laughs]

Outside of the Dead series, you’ve touched on zombies a couple of other times, with Creepshow and Two Evil Eyes was sort of a zombie story as well.

Well, sort of.

Right, not your style of zombies, but your half of Two Evil Eyes is about a guy trapped between life and death

Well, it’s Poe. It actually is Poe. Dario [Argento] called me up one day and said [affects accent] “I want to make a movie with Poe.” He said, you pick a story and originally I picked The Masque of the Red Death and it turned out somebody [else] was [adapting it for film], so I switched to Valdemar [The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar] and that was it. Dario came in, he shot his in Pittsburgh, I shot mine in Pittsburgh, and we had a good time doing it. It was fun.

And Creepshow?

They’re not really zombies either. They’re … I don’t know. Are they ghosts? I don’t know what they are.

Some sort of revenant.

They’re soggy.

I love the shot where Leslie Nielsen shoots Ted Danson in the head and it doesn’t stop him. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I felt like that was a little wink to your other zombie work.

Yeah, a little bit [laughs]. Right.

Return of the Living Dead 3

Yesterday marked the halfway point of the fifth annual Zombie Movie Marathon Month, so it seemed like a good time to check in. For those of you who haven’t been reading since last time, ZMMM is my annual month-long zombie-a-day film fest: one zombie movie a day, every day, for an entire month. For those who have been reading a while, you may be wondering why the hell this is happening now, rather than in June as it has in years past. My reasons are twofold:

1) My wife has long petitioned for me to move the marathon to a fall/winter month, arguing (rightly) that we have too much going on in summer — camping, travel, friends visiting — to give up time every day in June to watch a zombie movie. This might have been reason enough but then something came along to seal the deal…

2) We had a baby May 29, two days before I would have ostensibly started the marathon. Let me tell you, having a newborn in the house makes it pretty hard to get something like this done. It’s been hard enough now, and she’s almost five month old! Bottom line is, June was out, so October is in! And let’s face it, October is a more fitting month anyway.

Okay, on to this year!

My plan this year was simple: alternate movies I’ve seen with movies I haven’t, so I see half new stuff and half familiar stuff/classics. This is necessary for my sanity, since I have long since exhausted the supply of great zombie movies and moved well into the masses of mediocrity and outright crap. Yes, there are still some odd gems I haven’t got to, but they are few and far between. Another thing is I have integrated my watching of The Walking Dead into the marathon, for the simple reason that I don’t have enough time to watch a movie and that week’s episode on any given day, so each week there’s a new TWD, I will watch that as one of my new entries. With that, here’s what I’ve watched so far:

Flight of the Living Dead
Atom the Amazing Zombie Killer
Nightmare City
Juan of the Dead
Return of the Living Dead 3
The Stink of Flesh
Dawn of the Dead (Dario Argento edit)
Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis
Re-Animator
Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave
Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror
Dead Season
Zombieland
The Walking Dead Season 3 Ep. 1
Lucio Fulci’s Zombie
Quarantine 2: The Terminal

Now, on to the top five things I’ve learned from this year’s marathon so far!

1) The Return of the Living Dead franchise has exactly two movies that aren’t actively hazardous to your mental health: the original, and the third one (yay Mindy Clarke!). Admittedly, the third one would be much better if it weren’t supposed to be a RotLD movie, but at least it’s moderately entertaining. The fourth and fifth ones are fucking awful, and if I ever interview Peter Coyote, I’m going to ask him how the hell he ended up in those pieces of shit.  (Read my Return of the Living Dead 3 review.)

2) Every year, some weird theme appears as if by magic. This year it appears to be graphic vomiting scenes. I think like six of the movies have featured them. Yay vomit!

3) Nightmare City and Burial Ground, despite being utterly terrible, never fail to entertain me. Technically, I already knew this, but it was definitely reinforced. Those Italians sure know how to make a good-bad movie!

4) The season premiere of The Walking Dead was more entertaining than the entirety of last season, which is promising.

5) Award for Best New Movie (so far) goes to … Juan of the Dead, which was quite entertaining. Worst new movie so far is a tie for RotLD 4/5, especially number 4 since five at least had some gratuitous nudity to take your mind off the terrible movie itself. Those fucking movies had to have been made as some kind of tax shelter or money laundering operation.

That’s it for now, but I’ve been live-tweeting the movies I’ve already seen as I watch them. If you aren’t already following me on Twitter, and like staying up late, that could be amusing for you, right?

Halloween is almost here — not to mention the countless zombie crawls and related events October brings — which means it’s time to start thinking about a costume. Actually, who am I kidding? It’s long past time to start thinking about a costume, but most readers of this site have it easy: you’re going as a zombie, duh!

That said, as a hardcore fan, you probably want a hardcore costume. That means piecing together lots of little props, carefully aging your clothes into a suitably shitty state and practicing your zombie makeup day in and day out. Elaborate stuff. If, like me, you aren’t well on your way to having your elaborate zombie costume created, it’s probably time to think about going off the rack.

The people of HalloweenCostumes.com contacted me a while back about their off-the-rack zombie costume and asked if I wanted to give it a review. Considering I’ve reviewed everything from zombie films to zombie energy drinks, naturally I said yes. A few days later, I had their stock zombie outfit in my hands. Here’s how it shakes out.

What you get and how it feels
It’s a four-piece deal: shirt, pants, mask/wig and gloves (okay, five pieces if you count each glove as a separate thing). The shirt has a velcro closure and is large enough to fit over regular clothing, and light/thin enough you won’t sweat to death while wearing it. The pants are elastic waisted and of similar weight. Conversely, if you’re taking the kids trick or treating in a colder clime, you’re going to need to throw a flannel shirt over it, or maybe some long johns under it. Either would work.

The mask

The gloves are some kind of polyester or nylon — something synthetic, anyway. You could easily hold a drink while wearing them, but pay attention or it might slip out of your grasp. It also seems like the plastic zombie bits could come unglued from the gloves if you wear them much, so maybe slip a tube of superglue in your pocket if this concerns you. The mask and wig combo are attached via a hair net, which actually works well. I was able to wear my glasses inside or out, although they had a tendency to fog up while wearing them inside. As a whole, it seems comfortable enough that I could see going to a party in it, or spending an evening handing out candy or walking the kids around the ‘hood. It’s not leisure wear, but you won’t hate your life if you have to spend a few hours in it, supposing you choose your under/over clothing appropriately and can stand to keep a mask on that long.

Sweetness/Gruesomeness
So, how does it look? It looks Halloween-y, which is to say, not bad, but not the kind of thing that is going to win you a costume contest. Hey, it’s off the rack, what did you expect? The mask is set into a permanent snarl and the grotesque, lank grey hair suggests you were an aging hippie or hair-metal band dude before you went undead. The gloves have molded plastic backs with suitably fucked-up zombie hands with bones protruding and the like. The chest, arms and legs have similar detail pieces. The chest is particularly nice, as there are some intestines showing near the bottom. No guts, no glory!

The clothing part is pretty generic, just tattered looking gray fabric. It’s “torn” into flaps around the plastic detail pieces. Totally sufficient to scare the kiddies at the door looking for a free snickers, but not going to help you pull off that zombie prom queen thing you were going for. It’s much better than the generic plastic sheets with a rib cage printed on it that we all had as kids, though. Hell, it looks as good as the zombies in about half the Italian zombie movies from the ‘70s, for that matter. One issue is your neck is likely to show between the chest piece and the mask, so plan for that if it bothers you.

Customizability
Now here’s where you can find some value. As mentioned, you could easily throw a flannel shirt over the top, cut out the appropriate areas to show off the detail pieces, add some boots, suspenders, a stocking cap and an ax and boom, you’re a zombie lumberjack! even just adding a few bucks worth of fake blood to the detail piece areas could liven things up, and if you’re really feeling crafty you could cut the plastic bits out and glue or sew them into your own, more elaborate costume, where they would look pretty good — they are easily the most impressive bits of the whole thing. You could also wear the mask/wig combo and maybe the gloves with your dad’s cast-off denim jacket and torn jeans from his hesher youth and go as the zombified remains of Ratt or something. Or take it the other way — wear the clothes pieces but have your badass makeup artist friend do your face up with latex and what not. You get the idea — it’s easy to mix and match the pieces into something a little more original if you can’t go whole hog with something original but don’t want to settle for completely off the rack.

Verdict
You could do worse for your $40, I suspect. On the other hand, the picture on the order page is definitely touched up a bit, so don’t expect it to be quite that snappy. I’d definitely suggest planning to add some minor touches to customize it, but if you’re set on being a zombie this year, and lack the time, money, or skill to do a cinema-quality costume, you wouldn’t be ashamed to show up to the block party or chaperone children in this.

Zombies. Terrorists. Super-secret spy agencies. ACTION.

In Patient Zero, Jonathan Maberry has found a crossover so obvious, and so perfect, it is astounding it hasn’t already been done to death: the zombie apocalypse techno-thriller. Take one part pulpy grocery-store bestseller about the world’s most high-tech spies facing off against the world’s most desperate terrorists. Add an equal amount of classic zombie apocalypse scenario. Stir well, garnish with a Bond-worthy supervillain, and voilà! Patient Zero.

I’ll admit, techno-thrillers aren’t my area of expertise. I’ve read a Clancy novel (about twenty years ago, mind you) and a few of Crichton’s page turners, but that’s about it. Still, in Joe Ledger, a former soldier turned ace cop turned top-notch special agent, I’d wager that Maberry has created a character as badass as anything any classic of that genre has to offer. Then he puts the man in action sequence after action sequence, full of shootouts, face-munching zombie action and tense, life-or-death situations. Seriously, if you like action, this book delivers. And delivers. And delivers some more, almost—but not quite—to the point of oversaturation.

Ledger gets embroiled in a terrorist plot to release a bioweapon when he participates in a raid on a safe house and shoots a man. A day or so later, he meets with a super secret spook agency who has the man he killed in custody, only he’s not so dead any more… Soon, Ledger’s signed on to chase down the terrorists. Meanwhile, a brilliant terrorist super scientist and her evil Osama Bin Laden-on-steroids husband and their creepy, supervillain-esque financial backer are busy cooking up the ultimate bioweapon: a disease that turns people into zombies, naturally.

The action switches between Ledger’s investigations and raids and the various terrorist machinations, slowly unfolding into a compelling story with a decent number of twists and surprises. The surprises may be a bit obvious if you’re good at spotting that sort of thing, but it doesn’t really subtract from the fun. The climax is suitably epic, involving a lot of VIPs, a big public event and an attempt at a large-scale release of the pathogen.

It’s not a terribly deep book, but neither is it just disposable pulp. Yes, it’s arguably formulaic, but what a formula! Just as important as that formula is the lead character, Joe Ledger. Maberry keeps him a hell of a lot more relatable, and likeable, than someone like torture-happy Jack Bauer, without compromising his badass credentials at any point. As a result, he has a winner here, a tough but believable protagonist who’s easy to root for. That’s not a bad description of the book itself; it’s a damn fun read that’s easy to root for. The zombie lit genre is filled with middling crap and outright garbage, so when something this entertaining and well-executed comes along, you don’t scold it for not being the Great American Novel; you embrace it for being the wonderful, ripping yarn that it is.

Worst. wedding day. EVER.

The third film in the REC series has arrived, and with it arrive some changes. The first film inverted the paradigm of Night of the Living Dead, trapping survivors in a building with zombies. REC 2 turned the dials to 11, injecting a first-person shooter angle into the cinéma vérité mix and upping the adrenaline levels (think of REC as Alien and REC 2 as Aliens and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect.) Now REC 3: Genesis adds something else entirely unexpected: humor. Even weirder is that it works surprisingly well. (The rest of this review will contain the occasional spoiler for the first two films, so if you haven’t seen them and are spoiler averse, stop here).

 Contrary to early rumor, and the possibly misleading subtitle, this is not a prequel. It’s a sequel that takes place more or less concurrently with the first two films, tracing an incidental victim of the first film’s dog-zombie (never seen on screen in either film, just discussed) and the zombie havoc he wreaks on his nephew’s wedding. That’s the plot, by the way: zombie outbreak at a wedding. If you were expecting anything deeper than bridesmaids being eaten, sorry, move along.

That said, it is, without a doubt, the best zombie apocalypse at a wedding movie ever. As mentioned, this movie injects a healthy dose of humor in the mix in a serious tonal shift from the first two. You could call it a horror comedy, or a horror movie with some funny bits—it’s kind of on the border between the two—but either way, there are some great, genuinely funny moments in here, and some of the zombie kills are played for laughs. It never tries to be quite as yuck-yuck funny as Zombieland, but it’s close at some points, although the majority of it is played relatively straight.

Haters of the first two films’ found footage/cinéma vérité approach will be happy to hear that is abandoned here. The opening ten minutes or so are done via the same approach, until it suddenly ends it in a clever and funny way. From there on out it’s just traditionally shot (and quite gorgeous) zombie mayhem. The gore is really nicely done, and there’s plenty of it. The actors acquit themselves admirably, which is always a nice change of pace for a zombie movie. There are some nice references to the first two films (several of which are played for laughs) and it moves along at a brisk pace. It’s not a profound film in any way, but it is damn fun. There’s one odd bit, regarding the number of zombies around once the mayhem starts, that may or may be an error, but unless you’re looking for nits to pick, it’s not going to trouble you much (and hell, it could be intentional and hint at something I missed).

As with the first two films, zombie purists are going to be pissy about this being called a zombie movie. Whatever. Pretend it’s not if it makes you feel better, because it would be a shame to miss out on the series because of that stick in your ass. In case you’ve forgotten, these zombies are caused by a case of mass demonic possession. That plays a pretty important role in the plot, but isn’t too heavy handed. While I suspect any number of fans of the first two will be turned off by the turn toward humor, it worked really well. For me, at least, it made the religious mumbo jumbo go down a lot easier, and as much as I enjoy a bleak apocalypse, most of my favorite zombie movies include a solid dose of humor. Director Paco Plaza has definitely shown he has his own style apart from Jaume Balagueró, his co-director on the preceding films. It will be interesting to see how Balagueró handles REC 4.

REC 3: Genesis/Spain/2012

This week’s fashion zombie entry is something of a callback to one of my favorite zombie t-shirts of all time. It’s by the same artist (Aled Lewis), same company (Threadless) and it essentially illustrates the same scenario: our hero facing off the amassed undead from a tactically sound yet strategically doomed vantage point. What’s not to love? It could be called derivative of its forerunner, but I say that’s bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with an artist revisiting a theme over and over again if the theme is cool enough, and this one is plenty cool. This one will set you back $20 from Threadless, which is a mite steep, but I will say that I still have every Threadless shirt I have ever purchased and they are still in great shape, so you do kind of get what you pay for. If you are the patient type, you could also wait for one of their intermittent sales, which often see their fine torso coverings selling for as little as $10.

I’m attempting to assemble an all zombie-themed wardrobe. Fashion Zombie is my weekly post detailing the coolest zombie-themed clothes and accessories I can find. Check back every Monday for another look at the hottest zombie apparel.

Apparently the neologism YOLO is all the rage among the kids. An acronym of “You only live once,” YOLO is typically called upon to justify some stupid, rash, and occasionally lethal decision—like, say, teasing a zombie. If that were to happen, the result would be what you see above: You only live twice, even if the second time around it’s as some ghoulish, flesh-hungry, animated corpse. In other words, it’s just what everyone needs: a zombie-themed lampooning of the idiotic youth trend of the moment. Huzzah! This shirt will set you back $20 at Snorg Tees, which is a little steep in my opinion, but hey, YOLO, right?

I’m attempting to assemble an all zombie-themed wardrobe. Fashion Zombie is my weekly post detailing the coolest zombie-themed clothes and accessories I can find. Check back every Monday for another look at the hottest zombie apparel.

This week’s Fashion Zombie turns the spotlight on the Walken Dead. Is that a joke so obvious even your not-clever friend thought it up by the third episode of season 2 of The Walking Dead? It is. Is it a one-note, essentially dumb joke? It is. Does that mean it is any less sweet of a t-shirt? It does not. So enjoy your Walken Dead t-shirt and joke, for the reasonable price of $14.99 from TShirtBordello.com, or at least buy it for that friend of yours that just thinks it’s the funniest fucking thing he’s ever heard so maybe he will finally shut up about it. Bonus: In case you haven’t seen it, the video form of this one-note joke is embedded below.

I’m attempting to assemble an all zombie-themed wardrobe. Fashion Zombie is my weekly post detailing the coolest zombie-themed clothes and accessories I can find. Check back every Monday for another look at the hottest zombie apparel.